Fluco Toolbox: Taking Screenshots on a Chromebook

Welcome to Fluco Toolbox, a series of posts that showcases potential edtech tools for the Fluvanna County classroom. Each post will discuss the tool, the type of problems it can help solve, and how it can be used in the classroom. If you’re a Fluvanna County staff member and want to learn more about using the tool in your own classroom, please schedule to see your ITRT and we will develop professional development based around your needs. If you’ve stumbled upon this post and you’re not part of the district, no worries! Feel free to use the information provided to jumpstart your own research.

Have you ever needed students to capture an image on their screen? Needed students to capture their whole screen? Or have students found that they can’t save an image and need to capture it?

Today’s Fluco Toolbox tool is: the keyboard shortcut to do just that!

First, the basics:

Name: Take a screenshot on a Chromebook URL: N/A Cost: N/A Problem this tool solves: Allows you to capture all or part of the screen on a Chromebook

If you’ve ever needed to capture part of a screen on a Chromebook, or even the entire screen, there’s a special keyboard shortcut that accomplishes this. I use this shortcut often, and it’s how I get any training images I take while using my Chromebook. There’s no extra program to open, just 3 keys to press and hold at the same time.

First, you need to press the CTRL + Shift + Switch Windows buttons and hold them all down at the same time. Unsure of what the “Switch Windows” button is? Never fear! Check out this keyboard below. The key is circled, and can be found just above the “6” key.

When the keys are pressed, the screen will darken. I have tried to capture this in the two images below, but it is still hard to notice. The image on the left is a darkened screen, ready to be highlighted, and the image on the right is the regular view. If you decide that you no longer need to take a screenshot, just press ESC to exit the screenshot process.

To take a screenshot on the now darkened screen, all you need to do is click in the spot where you’d like to begin, and then drag out until you have captured whatever you need. Make sure you hold down on the mouse button the entire time. Here you can see the difference between the darkened part of the screen and the part being selected for a screenshot:

When finished, simply release the button, and a window will pop up in the lower right stating that the screenshot has been taken. It has been saved to the Chromebook’s storage area.

Students will need to immediately access the device’s storage and move the image to their Google Drive. Files saved to the school Chromebooks are not permanent, and are deleted whenever the Chromebook is logged out of an account or is shut down.

Resources

Need a visual? Check out this quick YouTube video:

(Do note that this video features a Chromebook that keeps work on it as long as needed. This is not the case with our student Chromebooks!)

Fluco Toolbox image created by Stephanie King (Fan) for this series. Please do not use without permission.